Worried About Negative Thoughts As A New Parent?

Worried about negative thoughts as a new parent? You’re not alone

- Amy Brown

If you believe what the media tells us, we should feel nothing apart from overwhelming love, gratitude, and excitement immediately when our baby’s born. Although becoming a new parent may indeed be a time of happiness, feeling a far more complex array of emotions is actually more common than you may think.

Research shows that overall happiness actually drops in the first year of having a baby, especially for women. Although parents may love their babies very much, it’s common to not love the things that come alongside it, such as money worries, sleepless nights, and feeling disconnected from your partner or friends.

However, parents often hide how they really feel, believing these thoughts are wrong, and that sharing them would have them labelled a ‘bad parent’. Worries such as this can be a core part of not feeling like a good enough parent and are also common in postnatal depression.

The mental health of new parents and the unexpected things that can happen in the first year of parenting is the subject of my latest book, Let’s talk about the first year of parenting (Pinter & Martin, 2020). I spoke with more than 500 parents who told me how they honestly felt after their baby was born.

What was immensely clear from their stories is that there’s no one ‘right way’ to feel once you have a baby. Alongside the positives, parents felt a whole host of emotions they weren’t expecting, often saying this was the first time they had spoken openly about their feelings. Here were some of the most common things people felt:

NOT LOVING YOUR BABY INSTANTLY